In a wide-ranging interview with The Hill, former Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka stresses that Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s “credibility is lost and unrecoverable.”
According to Gorka, major changes at the White House over the summer have left the president feeling “isolated”.
“I don’t think Ryan and McConnell are working against Trump, but they’re definitely not working with him,” said Gorka, who left the White House on Friday, one week after the dismissal of his close ally, White House strategist Steve Bannon.
“They still live in this fantasy illusion that November 8 was their victory as much as it was the president’s. And they will pay a penalty for that mistake and belief,” Gorka said in the phone interview for The Hill.
“Given that the president deliberately asked his colleagues on the Hill to bring relief to America from the disaster that is ObamaCare and that after eight years of promises, they failed. I would say Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan’s credibility is lost and unrecoverable,” he noted.
The 46-year-old Gorka came to the White House from Breitbart News, a site that has frequently criticized both congressional GOP leaders.
The site has significant power on the right, and could be a troublesome presence for Ryan and McConnell as they seek to corral the votes to raise the debt ceiling and fund the government in September, The Hill comments.
In the interview Gorka also said that Trump feels more isolated at the White House, and suggested he does not like all of the changes instituted by new chief of staff John Kelly, who has restricted access to the president as a means of bringing more discipline to the Oval Office.
“The president currently feels, to a certain extent, isolated. Individuals don’t have access to him as they did in the past. So we know General Kelly wanted to impose a certain regimen on the system. But there are aspects of the new regime that the president is not satisfied with, let me leave it at that,” he added.
Regarding his own exit from the White House, Gorka said Bannon’s ousting was a reason for his own departure, but he insisted the final straw, however, was a speech the president gave on the administration’s new Afghanistan policy that didn’t include the words “radical Islam.”
“There are individuals who don’t agree with the original agenda that we campaigned for. And as such, I can’t support that dilution of the original mission. But I can do a lot more on the outside to make sure the president’s original vision is implemented,” Gorka said.
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